Maya Angelou

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.

You are perfect. An exquisitely fine work of art, labor of love, suspended in silence. Bejeweled, trembling, kissed by a breeze, mesmerized by your beauty. You await in silence, beckoning me to a silken-wrapped slumber.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.

I want to be free; to escape. I use my pen as oars; the paper as my boat. I fill these pages to keep me afloat. I ride the waves of turmoil, so I can paddle away to calmer seas.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.